A blog on crisis communications best practices, emergency information and social media in emergency management ... an open forum for exchanging ideas and experience on emergency info and SMEM..
THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED WITHIN ARE MINE AND DO NOT REPRESENT OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT POLICY OR THE VIEWS OF MY EMPLOYER.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Social media listening: shared imperative for emergency management and national security

Most agencies recognize that relationships between individuals are no longer linear and in person ... social convergence (mobile + social) is both a source of empowerment for the people and an enabler (for good or bad).

The same basic activities in terms of social media monitoring apply to both open source intel work and for emergency management and public health purposes: real time listening and analysis, collection and validation.

After listening to the opinions of experts, I'm convinced that the most basic social listening tools we currently use (Hootsuite, Tweedeck, Geofeedia and others) are more than sufficient for EM purposes although they do not fill all needs for counter-terrorism or national security issues.

Despite the fact that the number of people who activate the GPS on their smartphone is quite small .... geo-location tools are supplemented by other algorithms/tools and can provide a large enough sample to get solid intel for situational awareness in emergencies.

The work done by the likes of Patrick Meier (@patrickmeier), Project EPIC and others ... gives the #smem community more than solid "academic" backing to validate this whole new field of emergency management.

And, surprisingly, more than a few people at the workshop think Edward Snowden did democracy a whole lot of good by forcing a public debate about the power of the state in the era of social convergence ...

1 comment:

Most agencies recognize that relationships between individuals are no longer linear and in person ... social convergence (mobile + social) is both a source of empowerment for the people and an enabler (for good or bad).http://dripfollowers.com/